Mission Providence was formed in 2014 as a joint venture between Mission Australia and the Providence Service Corporation. Together it works with government, employers, partners and job seekers to provide tailored employment services. The new venture has people in more than 60 locations across Australia.
The creation of the Mission Providence joint venture created challenges that needed to be solved rapidly. Furthermore, the venture needed an IT platform that would comply with Information Security Registered Assessors Program (iRAP) requirements.
Starting from scratch, Mission Providence needed to build a new IT environment as economically as possible without losing capability – and to be fully operational within just a few months.
With a focus on core skills and services, the venture had no desire for IT services on premises. Their preference was for a fully cloud-based environment with ongoing managed services. They needed to secure access to the network for 65 locations across the Australia.
The venture’s previous support agreement for IT management had only months to run when Datacom was engaged in July 2016. Mission Providence needed to take ownership of its own IT environment before November 2016 and complete iRAP accreditations by December 2016.
Datacom’s hybrid cloud evangelists worked with Mission Providence, providing a hybrid-cloud assessment, which enabled them to see their workloads and then to define the critical paths for each workload.
The bulk of the project comprised migrating Mission Providence’s on-premises IT infrastructure (from Mission Australia’s infrastructure) to the cloud using Microsoft Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Microsoft’s Azure platform. Datacom extended the value to Mission Providence by also organising the connecting fabric across the Datacom Wide Area Network.
Datacom’s successful delivery was due in no small part it to its hybrid cloud experience.
Being part of the Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider program means Datacom could quickly transition Mission Providence to the cloud and provide the hassle-free management service and consumptionbased pricing they were after. The new cloud model, based on the ‘Azure Workload’, allows Mission Providence to scale up or down easily.
Ten per cent of employees permanently require remote access – and now they have that. Using Office 365 on Azure has dramatically reduced the administration of remote users.
In the new virtual environment, Mission Providence now has four times as much storage capacity and none of the previous hardware and licensing costs.
Mission Providence has achieved savings of between 15 and 20 per cent per user, amounting to tens of thousands of dollars per month.
“Datacom is an organisation that stood up in our hour of need, listened to our requirements and created a time-sensitive project to deliver a cloud-based outcome for us.”
Mark Bancroft, Information Technology Manager, Mission Providence